The invention relates to a system for identifying members of a viewing audience.
For a commercial television network, the cost of its advertising time depends critically on the popularity of its programs among the television viewing audience. Popularity, in this case, is typically measured in terms of the program's share of the total audience viewing television at the time the program airs. As a general rule of thumb, advertisers prefer to place their advertisements where they will reach the greatest number of people. Thus, there is a higher demand among commercial advertisers for advertising time slots along side more popular programs. Such time slots can also demand a higher price.
Because the economics of television advertising depends so critically on the tastes and preferences of the television audience, the television industry invests a substantial amount of time, effort and money in measuring those tastes and preferences. One preferred approach involves monitoring the actual viewing habits of a group of volunteer families which represent a cross-section of all people who watch television. Typically, the participants in such a study allow monitoring equipment to be placed in their homes. Whenever a participant watches a television program, the monitoring equipment records the time, the identity of the program and the identity of the members of the viewing audience. Many of these systems require active participation by the television viewer to obtain the monitoring information. That is, the viewer must in some way interact with the equipment to record his presence in the viewing audience. If the viewer forgets to record his presence the monitoring statistics will be incomplete. In general, the less manual intervention required by the television viewer, the more likely it is that the gathered statistics on viewing habits will be complete and error free.
Systems have been developed which automatically identify members of the viewing audience without requiring the viewer to enter any information. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,858,000 to Daozehng Lu, issued Aug. 15, 1989 describes such a system. In the system, a scanner using infrared detectors locates a member of the viewing audience, captures an image of the located member, extracts a pattern signature for the captured image and then compares the extracted pattern signature to a set of stored pattern image signatures to identify the audience member.